It’s our pleasure to invite you to participate in the 8th international chess festival „Riga Technical University Open 2018”, which will take place on August 6th – 12th in already traditional venue - international exhibition centre “Kipsala” (8 Kipsalas Street) located across the bridge from the city center.

This year we will keep the changes that we introduced last year since they were even more successful than anyone could expect, bringing the total number of chess players participating in classical chess tournaments at the same time to record breaking 655.

The same five classical chess tournaments as last year will be organized. Any chess player starting from an internationally known top class GM to a beginner is welcome to find an appropriate tournament for him or her. The tournament A – the Grandmaster Open will have GM, IM, WGM and WIM norms. Last year the biggest names of the festival were Latvian GM Alexei Shirov, Indian GM Krishnan Sasikiran, GM Ilja Smirin and GM Tamir Nabaty from Israel and GM Daniel Fridman representing Germany. Many other strong GMs participated, including GM Vladimir Onischuk who managed to win this very strong event. The main tournament gathered 319 participants from 41 countries including 42 GMs and 176 titled players. Tournament A will be 7 days long, the same for tournament B (ELO until 2299 and Latvian rating until 2399), but Tournaments C (ELO until 2199 and Latvian rating until 2299) and D (ELO until 1900) will take place during weekend – Thursday-Sunday and will be 4 days long. Tournament E (Up to ELO 1600) will be the shortest one of the classical tournaments and will take only 3 days – Friday till Sunday. Let me remind you that time limit for the Tournament E is adjusted for players that have not yet used to very long classical games and will be 30 minutes + 30 per move for each player. All tournaments are FIDE rated.

We have introduced one more blitz tournament for those who do not have enough chess during our festival. The first blitz tournament will take place on Wednesday morning while the second one traditionally will be played after the closing ceremony.

This year the total prize fund that is planned to be 20 500 EUR with the 1st prize in the tournament A of 2500 EUR.